Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday September 08, 2010 @11:27PM
from the taking-a-closer-look dept.

Here's an interesting and funny look at 526,000 OkCupid users, divided into groups by race and gender and all the the things each groups says it likes or is interested in. While it is far from being definitive, the groupings give a glimpse of what makes each culture unique. According to the results, white men like nothing better than Tom Clancy, Van Halen, and golfing.

I've had a long-standing belief that the heavy preference for outdoorsy crap in women's profiles is their way of engineering the males they receive responses from. The basic idea is to frame yourself in an athletic manner, thereby driving off the lazy, the fat and the unambitious. In practice, I'd expect this to torpedo a lot video gamers, guys who live at home, geeks and low wage earners. In essence, it's a type of razor wire that kills off all the guys no woman wants to talk to.

More that our external representations of ourselves rarely match the actual. Look at the crazy pictures people put on Facebook for their profiles - 40 year olds with some photo from their mid-twenties before they got fat. Listing a bunch of interests you rarely participate in (unless bumping into your dusty huffy n the garage counts as cycling).

No, executives make all the money while doing nothing useful(they spend more time trying to figure out how to enrich themselves than they do the company). Case in point, over the past 10 years executive pay has skyrocketed in the US while stocks are, at best, stagnant. This is why I always laugh whenever the Republicans complain about taxing the richest 10% is placing an unfair "burden" on the most "productive" people. Beyond a certain point the relationship between salary and productivity is tenacious,

>>To most software engineers who aren't living in NYC or Silly Valley $110k/year is a bit more than "a decent wage".

For people in NYC or Silicon Valley it isn't eye-raising. A friend of mine started at $80k or so a year and is in the six digits now. Hard worker. Lives in a two-bedroom apartment with his wife and kids. If Obama raises taxes on him... it won't be good for him. Might force him to quit and move elsewhere. Bad for him, bad for the US's economy as they lose taxes off his wages.

>>So you prefer to lose half your income to insurance companies and lawsuits? To each their own I guess.

I'd rather not lose half of it at all.:p

Our 1M/2M liability insurance runs about a thousand dollars a year. Hard to say how much health insurance costs all total since it's subsidized, but before I got married it was around $300/month. Lawsuits? We do what we say we'll do, and have only gotten into litigation twice in the last decade, and won both.

Deriving the minimum income for families requires a bit of calculation. The CBO adjusts household income by the square root of the number of people in the household. So, the minimum income of a two-person household in the top 10% in 2007 was $102,900 * 1.414 = $145,500.

Poor couple only making $140k/year.. I make $63k, supporting a child and a wife with $60k in student loan debt that we'll likely never be able to pay off. And I'm a software engineer (and a rather good one). Not sure why I should feel sorry for your hypothetical couple.

Oh wow, silly me, implying that two married people who make $80k per year should pay as much in taxes as two people single people who make $80k per year!

If the US wasn't filled with people who are so obsessed with acquiring wealth at all costs, maybe we wouldn't have so much crime, violence, stupidity, etc. Guess what? YOU are responsible for raising your child. If you do poorly in that regard, YOU have failed your kid. And pawning them off on a day care at 3 months old until they start first grade,

outdoorsy crap in women's profiles is their way of engineering the males they receive responses from. The basic idea is to frame yourself in an athletic manner, thereby driving off the lazy, the fat and the unambitious. In practice, I'd expect this to torpedo a lot video gamers, guys who live at home, geeks

I'll have to agree with that one. Some of my outdoorsey friends have had problems with women using that as a filter and then treating them like fixer-uppers. Granted they were also to blame. If she says that she enjoys fishing and camping, don't say yes when she asks you about fine dining and shopping. Just be honest.

Hmm, I think the outdoorsy shtick relates more to young women in rural/outlying areas. They may not really like riding ATVs, camping, fishing, and hiking, but they like guys who listen to songs about tractors and like ATVs and fishing. It could be more about who they are trying to attract than who they wish to exclude. I live on the edge of civilization, where all macho guys to the South and East wear cowboy hats (when they go to the country music dancing bar), claim to hunt and fish (though most of them ha

Right now, I'm the government's bitch and I'll speak nicely of them if I want my unemployment benefits that I need while they strangle me with bureaucracy and I learn new skillz so that I can go back to making lots of money and paying lots of taxes.

Such stuff is an ADVERTISEMENT. The woman is trying to sell herself, so she lists stuff that she thinks make her attractive to others.

Normal people don't spend all their time thinking everything through as if it is a move in a chess game.

Think of it as going to an exotic location on holiday just to bake in the sun. You want to world to see you as an exciting person who has seen the world, when all you really want to do is not do anything at all.

Really, the reason nerds often do bad with women is because they overthink it all. STOP. If women were complicated, jocks wouldn't be able to deal with them.

Actually, when you're on a dating site, it's very much worth it to repel the people you're not interested in. If you seem attractive to everybody, you'll be approached by everybody, and you're in for a lot of work trying to figure out who might possibly like the real you. Instead, be honest about your bad side, and you might find someone who doesn't mind that bad side.

Of course it's also good to be aware of your bad aspects and work on them. Nothing wrong with liking comic books (to take just one example),

But false advertising hardly seems to be a way to start a relationship you'll actually enjoy.

For a start there's the aspect that you're essentially starting your relationship with a lie. It's not a way to say "let's trust each other" in the long run. Once you're aware that she lied her ass off to land what she thinks is a prize male, what else is she lying about? It's not even a way to boost confidence, as basically if she was after a generic prize male and not after someone actually matching or anything, you're nothing more than a fungible commodity.

But that's not even the most important part.

The more perverse part is that it's selecting someone whose personality is pretty much guaranteed to not match hers. A guy who's actually into camping and going fishing and traveling to exotic locations, is going to want to actually do that. That's what he's interested in, and that's what makes him happy. But if she really hates those, only put those in to seem more attractive, and is actually into watching soap operas and shopping... that's not going to be all that good a match, is it? At some point down the line it's either going to mean a lot of being alone on weekends for her and whining about how men are so insensitive as to go fishing and leave her alone, while the guy is still doing his activity solo in spite of having been mistakenly thinking that he found a girl to accompany him. Or it's going to mean her freezing her ass off in a tent on some mountain and hating every minute of it, just because she lied about it before. Or various other variants of essentially not being particularly happy with what the other's actual interests are.

On a site designed for matching interests, why not, you know, actually try to actually match interests?

If your interests are shopping for clothes, why not put that down and maybe find a guy who's also into shopping for clothes? Granted, he'll probably be gay, but still...;) Or at least someone who knows up front what he's getting into, and is prepared to resign to that fate.

Essentially, I'm reminded of The Beauty And The Beast. It's apparently actually a story which can cause women to stay in an abusive relationship, because they learned that eventually they'll change the beast. (At least according to one study.) Or even essentially look for the most fashionable beast on the block, because, hey, you can change him later. Except the beast never changes, and nagging him will just get you to see a bit more of the beast part. Usually coming at high speed at you.

In this case she's choosing to attract the kind of person which is pretty much guaranteed not to actually like the real her. It's just fishing for a different kind of beast. And if anyone is thinking that either beast will change, they're still going to have a funny surprise down the road.

While you were typing all that, I just lied my way into dates with three banging hot chicks who are into long walks and pilates-skydiving or whatever the hell it was that I ticked. Now, which of us has fitted genes, Poindexter?

(Unfortunately, there's no clear consensus on that one. It's interesting to look at where stats is at various universities--- sometimes it's in "math" or "applied math", other times it's in a separate dept all on its own.)

I bet if the site allowed you to keep part of your profile private, with access reserved only for your buddies, a certain multi-ethnic theme would emerge. A predilection for BJ's would cross all cultural barriers and leap to number one on the list of things most guys like.

Stereotyping is never good, but it has a higher degree of confidence based on the divergence of individual characteristics, as well as population. (For example, you say "all 17 year old black males like rap music", but you're actually looking at more than one characteristic - there typically is less divergence among economic status, geographic distance from peers, etc.. to put it bluntly, they tend to be poor and live close together)

Among white males, this tends to be less true wider array of economic functioning (higher % of upper middle class), geographic distribution (with few exceptions, white males can *socially* live wherever they want, if they can afford it), etc. So there's no *typical* white male.

If I follow you correctly -- your assumption is that due to their economic status black males tend to live in larger and less diverse groups than white males. And as a result they are more likely to have similar interests. Ok that makes sense. And unfortunately you are correct that statistically, white males generally find themselves in better financial situations, which does give them more flexibility when deciding where they want to live. But, last time I checked, upper middle class white males (and/o

They can divide this up by white/black/asian/indian/etc, but they aren't dividing it up by culture. Quite often whites in America have very little in common... just like Taiwanese and Koreans have very little in common (aside from being 'asian')... or Tanzanians and Russians... T^T

Yup, just like how the blacks from Kenya, Europe, and America have very different cultures and thus an outlook on life. And yes, I've heard this personally from them in the workplace (casual talk, no heated debate).

This study has it ass-backwards. If you're looking to categorize, do it by culture NOT race. To conduct a study like this is based on a false premise to begin with.

It's not race, it's culture. There are typical "black" and "white" subcultures in the US. Or at least subcultures where not every skin color is proportionally represented. Not every person with black or white skin identifies with those subcultures, but they will have a big impact on these kind of statistics.

There is of course also a geek/engineering culture. From these OKCupid statistics, you can tell that a significant number of Asians and Indians (don't they also come from Asia?) identify with geeky/engin

I'm going to define a category consisting of all high-school dropouts in the US, plus lee1026. I expect I would be able to find that many unflattering traits are overrepresented in this group, so obviously the category is meaningful.

As someone who took a semester of Sociology 101 years ago, I am here to snobbishly inform you that race is a social construction and that you can divvy it up however you wish.

(Actually, as I vaguely recall reading---I took more than just the 101 course---there's a wealth of fascinating legal history about the construction of race in this country other than the typical White/Black/Native American issues, mainly due to naturalization law. I think I remember something about Indians arguing that they were white once science caught on to the genesis, but were ruled nonwhite because they had darker skin. And a Japanese guy who argued that he was white because he had light skin, but was ruled nonwhite because...I forget. Slanty eyes, maybe.)

As someone who took a semester of Sociology 101 years ago, I am here to snobbishly inform you that race is a social construction and that you can divvy it up however you wish.

Actually, I was going for +1 pedantic hyperbole, using a pedantic example of the GGP's post to disprove the GGP's post and point out how futile it is to place "not a race" constructs around these issues, as you have pointed out.

But seeing as we are talking about sciences.... Going back to high school level biology where there are

But seeing as we are talking about sciences.... Going back to high school level biology where there are only three distinct races, Caucasian, Mongoloid (Asian) or Negroid (African) which can be easily determined by physical evidence.

You went to high school a really long time ago then, or you got your education from some really misinformed people. If you want to divide humanity into races based on genetics, you end up with either two races (those who left Africa, and everybody else), or dozens. The differences between Africans are far, far greater than those between Europeans and Asians, for example.

Basing it on a single cosmetic feature like skin color (which is subject to strong evolutionary pressure, which means it can change pretty

I don't see how being able to determine race by examining hair samples differs significantly from being able to determine race from, you know, just looking at someone. Or being able to determine racial characteristics from DNA. It's sort of obvious that there are a variety of ways to distinguish racial groups---we, unlike Stephen Colbert, can tell. That sort of misses the point of the sociological statement. Whatever that is.
Also, I'm not a big fan of that particular XKCD, mainly because he forgot to put

REALITY: 80% of self-identified bisexuals are only interested in one gender.

12% of women under 35 on OkCupid (and the internet in general, I'd wager) self-identify as bi. However, as you can see above, only about 1 in 4 of those women is actually into both guys and girls at the same time. I know this will come as a big letdown to the straight male browsing population: three-fourths of your fantasies are, in fact, fantasies of a fantasy. Like bi m

Actually I like reading lists about what Asian women like,
From today I'm a simple person and mechanical engineer who enjoys noodles, cricket and basketball.

You're assuming asian women are necessarily after asians.
Where I live there are many people os japanese ancestry (pre WWII immigration), and I've heard from different women of that group that they did not want anything with ethnic japanese men. And I saw many times such women with white men. - It seems that it works the same for ethnic japanese men.
No idea why is that so.

Where I live it's not unusual to see mixed race couples, in fact it's almost the norm.

No idea why is that so.

Grass is greener, what to escape some kind of cultural issues, get away from the family. Could be many reasons but for the most part mixed race couples have the same motivation as non-mixed couples, love and money.

I see a lot of mixed race people these days, not just with mixed race white/Asian people bu

Actually I said basketball, baseball wasn't even mentioned under Asian in the article.

Also they counted India as separate from Asia, I'm not sure about the rest of the sub continent (pakistani, sri lankan) but I suspect the whole thing is based on racial groups based in western countries.

That counts as the single most conveniently ignored fact for Christian and the rest of the Okcupid team.

They can be great for laughs, and I've laughed at them... but I've also seen indications that they aren't just joking, and probably think they know a lot more from their half-baked statistics than they do.

Interesting that "White People" like red socks and NASCAR. There couldn't be a little bias here possibly, or would I really find that Italians, Norwegians, Russians, Africans and Bosnians really do have this type of interest.

That wasn't an extremely polite way of saying that... admit it, you're not actually Canadian, are you? You're from New York! Nice try, NY, but -real- Canadians would apologize for being Canadian and liking Van Halen, and then would invite AC to have a beer.

Well, I think 100 is a bit excessive, but how about 1 or 2? I used to live with 2 cats but now only have one and think it is wonderful but what really makes my life enjoyable is the 40k comic books that I own. And no, I don't see anything wrong with being a nerd! I feel that I have been a happier person than most other people and my "secret" is to simply do what *I* enjoy and not giving a damn whether other people do the same thing and/or approve of it or not!

I just like having sex with random strangers. Bars, online, clubs (like the ones you mention), they are all good. Promiscuous men are the real evolutionary winners. How many kids can you have with one woman. 15, maybe 20 tops. A real evolutionary winner can do that weekly.:p

It's not an either/or thing. You can join a dating site and go out and meet people. Having hobbies and meeting people is healthy even if you already have a relationship. Joining a hiking club with the explicit expectation to pick up a girl there is not such a good idea. It might happen, but it's not what hiking clubs are for (unlike dating sites).

I go out and meet people, my wife goes out and meets people, yet we met on a dating site. My brother goes out and meets people but is still single. Dating sites de

Or evidence that the Christians are considerate of the wide spread of readership their profile will get, and deliberately write at a simple level to accommodate that readership, whereas the atheists just want to show off and don't care about their readers.

Seems to me that what you have there is data, not evidence.

For what it's worth, I have a profile on OK Cupid, and deliberately kept the language and writing style simple. But I have "solipsist" in the "religion" box on my profile, and we didn't get include